Written by Joshua Emmanuel Go

As you lay in bed thinking about your final moments a feeling would come for you, a way to rest your soul from the weariness of Life and embrace Death as if it is an old friend. That is what many would consider death—a departure of the individual from the living both physically and psychological. 

Yet there is a saying that when those who truly remember you die, you quietly vanish from living memory. This death where your name is remembered for the last time is your final death. With memories that they have of you gone, your soul can finally move on. 

Others say that death is but a step to a new eternal life or just a cycle for a new body. However, we are individuals that can never remember what kind of life we lived in our past and what would be our future but only our current lives. 

That is not to say we don’t want to be remembered in the depths of our hearts. We want to be remembered long after our demise. Yet in our desire to be remembered, a gnawing disturbance comes to mind. We would ponder and wait for a chance to move on from the weight of what our lives have carried. We want to be free from the burdens of being remembered in a life no longer our own but embellished by fiction and exaggeration. We no longer want to hear of our history in a biased lens of those who don’t truly know us. Because of those examples, the people who wish to move on to a final death in obscurity are those who are famous, yet resent the cause of their fame.

The practice of mourning for the dead is a common tradition in the Philippines with our faith just being a single component of it. During our common days to properly pay respects to the dead we remember the people who have departed yet haven’t truly forgotten. We remember the times we had with them, and the stories of those who were with them. Nothing could be the same without them. Yet it is also time to move on since even if we remember, we must always move forward to the future since we’re meeting them again albeit in another point of our lives. We would always be grateful for them. The same as when we die people would be grateful to us because of our words and deeds. 

In the far future, when your soul can finally move on, forgotten except for those who have recently departed that remembered you, there comes a freeing release in your soul. Whether to have a higher purpose with eternal life or reincarnate to a new mortal body it doesn’t matter anymore. Finally, dying without regrets and to move on from past burdens is just one more step in finally shedding away your current life and onto the next one.